5 Tips for Onboarding New Hires

A crucial part of training employees is bringing them up to speed quickly and efficiently. This onboarding process can impact the company’s bottom line, and its ability to scale into new markets. The following are some tips on how to make the process smooth and productive:

Design a proper training schedule: You cannot expect good results from a poorly planned training regiment. Designing a proper training schedule is crucial to effective onboarding. Start with the desired learning outcomes, then group those outcomes into lessons, lessons into sections, sections into courses, and courses into curriculum. Be sure to keep the schedule transparent to learners. No surprises. Also, be sure to get buy-in from department heads as training relates to the unique needs of their team. The schedule would act as a road map for new hires and it will help keep track of training progress.

Design a proper communication schedule: Much like a training schedule, it is equally important to establish a strong communication schedule. Here, you can emphasize the goals, expectations and timing pertaining to the training program. Excellent channels of communication include, internal newsletter, attending team meetings, memos from the executive team, and lots of water-cooler talk. It’s important to over communicate with new hires so they know how serious you are about the training program and how it adds value.

Make the training reference-able: The onboarding stage is like drinking from a fire hose; although new hires go through training, the reality of it is that people forget. Increase employee knowledge retention by keeping critical information available for reference, before, during and after the formal training. If all of your training is live one-and-done, then I am afraid to report that you are fighting a losing battle.

Practice roleplaying: We do a lot of interactive conversations, mock demos, and active role-playing here at LearnCore. I love it because it forces the new hire to quickly find their voice, build confidence, and adjust to curve balls.Ultimately, role playing trains new hires on how to deal with customers. Role playing exercises are not only interactive but they are also great at boosting confidence. LearnCore’s Pitch IQ is an interactive role playing tool that helps companies scale and automate this aspect of training.

Analyze and report: If you ‘aint’ getting data, you ‘aint’ doing it right.An important goal of training new hires is to assess their performance. At the end of each training, you need to know who is ready to talk with customers, and who will just muck it up. Establish fundamental benchmarks, and use analytics to evaluate new-hire performance. There are few things more exciting to a manager than when a program outperforms its KPI’s.

Make the training process as interactive as possible to make it more impactful. For more on the topic please visit our blog or contact sales@dev.learncore.com.